The Advanced Weeklong is an in-depth experience of community and support for those becoming or deepening as Focusing professionals.

The theme this year is "Energy and Connection: Moving Focusing Outward - Clear Paths for Focusing Professionals."

Do you want to energize your Focusing teaching or your Focusing-oriented
therapy practice?

Do you feel a mission to move Focusing outward... but you're not sure how?

Would you like new tools, fresh perspectives, and connection to an international community at your level of training or more?

Whether you are ready for the final step of The Focusing Institute
certification process, or whether you are a certified Trainer
looking for new energy and connection, this Weeklong will support
your goals and create community to move toward those goals together.
You can gain confidence and skills in facilitating and teaching
Focusing as well as in bringing applications of Focusing to
clients.

The Facilitators: Robert Lee, Ph.D., and Ann Weiser Cornell,
Ph.D.

Robert Lee will bring an
emphasis on Project Groups, helping you to become a “Focusing
activist,” and creating partnerships and communication across
languages and cultures. Ann Weiser Cornell will teach her
“Empathy-Based Marketing” – how to use empathy to spread Focusing.
Both offer powerful methods for applying Focusing to difficult
issues, new processes for therapists and Focusing guides, and
teaching ideas.

Robert L. Lee has developed a new model for
teaching focusing (Domain Focusing), as well as a theory and practice
for change on the macro level (Changing the Unchangeable). His
comprehensive practice encompasses working with difficulties in felt
sense formation (Elusive Felt Sensing), special methods for using
focusing in couples' and group therapy, and working with difficult
feelings (depression, anxiety, terror, rage)

Ann Weiser Cornell loves helping people to emerge as
more confident teachers and facilitators of Focusing. Since 1989 she
has guided over 60 people in 10 countries to become Certified
Focusing Teachers. Ann was the first person to earn her living as a
Focusing teacher, and is a pioneer and advocate for this profession.
She has taught hundreds of Focusing workshops to thousands of people
over 25 years. She has a background in linguistics and a passion for
facilitative language. Since discovering how marketing can be based
on empathy, she now loves marketing!

The Prerequisite: You need to be a Trainer or a
Trainer-in-Training or have special permission to attend.

Each year a unique international group of trainees and trainers
attend the Advanced Weeklong - and each year lifelong
friendships and creative partnerships are formed.

The teachers were all EXCELLENT and each of them made this experience
so valuable!!!

The workshop exceeded all my expectations. There were the incredible
deep connections with many people and I am still shaking and quaking with
emotional/spiritual energy.

A week with wonderful like-minded people, with good food and a serene
and beautiful setting where stimulating workshops and conversations were
always available.

A special feature of the Weeklong is the Emerging Teachers. These featured
Focusing teachers will facilitate Project Groups for the participants that offer
exciting ways of bringing Focusing forward.

Our five Emerging Teachers for 2009 invite you:

Beatrice Blake
For Those Interested in NVC and in Teaching Focusing at the Community Level:

Teaching
Focusing through Nonviolent Communication is a good way to “get your foot in the
door” when presenting Focusing to groups that might not otherwise be interested
in it or grasp what it is about. Over the last year, Wendy Webber and I have
developed a way of teaching Focusing and NVC together, called The Heart of
Change. We have tried it with two groups here in Vermont, and six groups in El
Salvador, with much success.

The engaging teaching techniques of NVC can be used to present Focusing
experientially. Participants learn about the Focusing attitude, empathic
listening, felt sensing, resonating, reflection and “the process belongs to the
focuser”, all by playing Feelings and Needs Poker, a game originally developed
by Lucy Leu to teach NVC in California prisons. We have found very little
resistance to the card game format. It is familiar, non-threatening, not too
touchy-feely. Adapting the rules of the card game to facilitate teaching
Focusing allows the participants to have the experience of focusing and felt
shifting with minimal guiding, which develops an “I can do this” feeling rather
than “I can’t do this without the expertise of my teacher”. Of course there is a
deepening understanding of the intricacy of Focusing as people continue to
practice with an experienced coach or teacher, but the initial experience is
empowering. Of course, a benefit of Heart of Change is that participants learn
the invaluable tools of NVC, which greatly facilitate change in interpersonal
relationships.

A cherished tradition at the Weeklong is the café in the evenings. One or
more or those café times will be available for experiencing the card game, and
Step into Presence, a kinesthetic way of integrating Focusing and NVC.

The weeklong would be a great place for a daily work group with those of you
who are interested in Focusing and NVC and in teaching community focusing in
general—finding ways to “put it in the drinking water”.

Beatrice Blake has been a Certified Focusing Trainer since 2000 and took her
first Nonviolent Communication workshop in 2006. In 2007, she was invited by a
community organization in El Salvador to teach Focusing, which she did for five
months. While there, she noticed that people responded with more interest to
learning NVC, so she started teaching NVC as a “doorway” to Focusing.

She attended the Community Focusing Gathering in June 2008, and there started
collaborating with long-time focuser and NVC teacher Wendy Webber on their
common interest of blending the two processes.

She was invited back to El Salvador in the summer of 2009, and gave a series of
Heart of Change workshops to three different groups of workers in the Central
Market of San Salvador and to three groups of helping professionals, including
the National Mental Health Council. The workshops are being continued by a
Salvadoran mother-and-daughter team in several outlying communities, reaching
people in need who are responding enthusiastically.
This work has been supported by generous donations of Focusers in Holland, Japan
and the US.

For
the 2009 Advanced and Certification Weeklong I will facilitate a project group
exploring the practice of “Focusing and This Very Moment.” When we are able to
open to what is, we tap the Wellspring, out of which our spirituality/creativity
flows. As experienced Focusers, we know that even difficult feelings can become
doorways to freedom. How can we develop our ability to be the Space, stay with
the Edge, to bear our lack of bearings, to allow freshness to flow?

Possibilities for this group include bringing a specific creative or
spiritual project /practice to illuminate and explore throughout the week. This
could be writing, music, art, a meditation practice, or development of a
personal mantra. Come As You Are!

Jan Hodgman is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest with eight years of monastic
practice in Japan. She sat in on Eugene Gendlin’s Theory Construction class in
1993, an early form of Thinking at the Edge. Her training coordinator is Reva
Bernstein, and her Levels work was with Ann Weiser Cornell, Ph. D. Most of her
present work is with individual clients, many of whom have a meditation or
creative practice. She also serves as an on-call chaplain for a hospice and has
grown through work with end-of-life and Alzheimer’s issues. She especially
enjoys facilitating and supporting creative and spiritual breakthroughs.

Susan Lennox

I
am delighted to be an Emerging Teacher and look forward with great enthusiasm to
meeting you at the Certification Weeklong. As you know, the Weeklong is designed
to energize your Focusing teaching or practice and support you in your efforts
to bring Focusing into your life and your work in fresh, new ways. But perhaps
you are feeling a bit torn between competing paths, or maybe even a little
stuck, scared or shut down. Or maybe you would like to develop some skills and
perspectives that would enable you to help your clients or others who are
feeling this way in their lives. At the weeklong, I would be interested in
meeting with any of you who are interested in exploring how Focusing on “parts”
of the self can be effective in working on issues such as these and more.

I am totally fascinated and inspired by working with parts of the self. In my
work as a Focusing-Oriented Coach, I have found that when my clients are gently
guided to awareness of their inner parts and learn how to relate to them with
open acceptance, curiosity, and compassion, they unfold an amazing world of
inner richness and achieve greater freedom to move forward in their lives. I
have been learning and working with parts models and approaches drawn from both
Treasure Maps Focusing and Internal Family Systems Therapy for several years and
would love to share some of what I have learned with you. Perhaps you are
familiar with other parts models and would like to bring them into the
exploration. I hope that this conversation will give us all some new ways to
help ourselves and others to develop greater inner clarity and alignment, free
up blocks and stuck places, and catalyze movement in life-forward directions.

To share a little about myself, I am a Focusing Coodinator from the Boston
area. I learned Focusing in the 1990s and trained with Joan Klagsbrun and Neil
Friedman to become a Focusing Trainer in 2000. I also was introduced to Focusing
with parts in a Treasure Maps to the Soul retreat with Ann Weiser Cornell and
Barbara McGavin in 2005 and later took additional Treasure Maps retreats and
Master Classes with them. Totally intrigued by the potential of working with
self parts, I went on to study therapeutic approaches to parts work using the
Internal Family Systems model. I have completed a yearlong Level I IFS training
and am currently entering Level II IFS training and serving as a Practice
Assistant in the incoming IFS Level I training program. I use approaches drawn
from both Treasure Maps and IFS in my personal solo and partnership focusing, as
well as with my clients in my practice, Growing Edge Focusing & Coaching. I hope
you will join me in exploring this exciting area and look forward to meeting you
soon.

Suzanne Noël

My
passion for Recovery Focusing is due to the way in which it allows each person
to take the 12 Step Program inside, bringing to people an inner, personal
experience of their addictive process, as seen through the 12 Steps. It then
follows this with an inner felt experience of Recovery, lighting up their path
with hope of "what could be".

Clients love going inside and waiting to see what arrives from this space and
then sharing it with the group. The group itself listens in quiet respect to the
sacred sharing that emerges from each person. Recovery Focusing thus enables us
to connect to ourselves, to each other, and to "something greater" than
ourselves in a gentle and personally meaningful way. It moves us from the worst
of the addictive process to the best of recovery!

At this point in time, Recovery Focusing is most appropriate to treatment
centers that integrate their clients into a 12 Step Program. The future
potential, however, expands out to any 12 Stepper for people to engage in
Co-Sponsorship through Recovery Focusing Partnerships or for 12 Steppers to meet
for Recovery Focusing Changes meetings. At this point, I am only planting seeds.

Ruth Rosenblum
Focusing,
Relationality and Spirituality: Dippings, Crossings, and This Miraculous Mystery
of Enlivened Living

I am honored and grateful to have been invited to be an Emerging Teacher at this
year’s Weeklong conference. Since attending my first workshop ten years ago, I
have been passionate about Focusing. This miraculous process of touching into
and accessing embodied experience - that is, experiencing how a particular
situation is actually living in and through me - has deeply impacted my life,
expanding my feelings of connectedness and increasing my sense of aliveness. I
experience a larger sense of “beingness” and feel fuller and more whole than
ever before.

From the beginning, Focusing has intersected with my two other passions -
psychotherapy and spirituality, . By bringing Focusing to the study and
exploration of psychological and spiritual concepts and theories, we can
EXPERIENCE new understandings and connections between these three dimensions of
awareness, healing and change.

When I am “waiting at the edge of awareness” and something new and unexpected
emerges, I experience a touching into the More and the Mystery of the new
arising out of “a nowhere that seems to have also always been there.” What is
happening? Is this mystery of emergence not a spiritual experience? Is this
process of “waiting at the doorway” for a word or symbol the same process that
psychologists refer to as “formulating unformulated experience"? Is this pausing
and listening for “IT” to respond similar to the listening that spiritual
teachers speak of? For me, the practices of Focusing and relational
psychotherapy, like spirituality, can be a process of transformation.

Together, we will “dip into” philosophical, psychological and spiritual
writings, including those of Eugene Gendlin, Rabbi Harold Kushner, Lynn Preston,
David Spangler, Brother David and others - and then use Focusing to sense into
“the crossings” of these dimensions as well as the implications of such
intersections.

I look forward to our having a lively and enlivening experience together.

Ruth Rosenblum, LCSW, is a Focusing Oriented psychotherapist and trainer who
teaches and practices in Westchester County, NY. She is a co-founder of the
Westchester Changes Group and the newly formed Westchester Focusing consortium. Ruth
continues intensive study with Lynn Preston and is on the faculty of the
Focusing-Oriented Relational Psychotherapy program. Additionally, she is a
student of Vipassana meditation and a teacher of Jewish Meditation practices.
She has presented workshops on the intersections of Focusing, Psychotherapy and
Spirituality at national and international conferences.

Tuition: $900

Room & Board: There are two types of housing. Simple accommodations
are in the lodges and very comfortable accommodations are in the Gilmor Sloane
Home. Gilmor Sloane is a beautiful restored Victorian home. Each room has a
private bath.